A Report by Alba Florian

THE MALTA DRAMA CENTRE took part in the First World Youth Festival held in Vienna between 17-26th July 2009. Ten intermediate students travelled to the Austrian capital, accompanied by tutor-director Lino Farrugia, to present Fakusi Lotu Kumba (in "fantasy" language meaning "Right or Wrong") by Mario Azzopardi, the Centre's principal.

IN SPITE OF the incredible heat wave we had to face the moment we lay foot in Austria, our excitement was at its highest. One could see, hear, taste, touch and smell culture all over the place. One could feel the theatrical atmosphere all over the De La Salle boarding school where the festival was being held. The fact that so many people from different countries and cultures, had gathered there because of their love for theatre, simply amazed us. None of us, seven young Maltese women and three Maltese young men, had ever participated in such a festival and this added to our excitement and anticipation.

Ten workshops were created, each of them with 15 to 20 people from different countries. The purpose of these workshops was to devise and mount a final performance to be shown at the Museum Quartier in the centre of Vienna. Two workshop leaders from each country were to lead their work by collecting all the participants’ ideas together and presenting a final piece. Together with these workshop leaders there would be a German university theatre student helping out.

It was a very good opportunity to gather different theatre perspectives from around the globe (no less than nineteen countries took part in the festival) and therefore create a multicultural theatre project. Despite the great language barrier, many people exploited this marvellous opportunity and worked hard on sharing their theatrical experiences and knowledge with the rest of their workshop companions. We all got the chance to experience the silent universal language of theatre in order to communicate with each other. A language built on looks, gestures, sounds and most important of all, feelings.

Unfortunately, some others considered building up a performance as being "too childish and too artificial". They seemed to have come to Vienna expecting to find more time to share their knowledge of theatre instead of harmonising everyone’s improvised input towards a collectively devised performance. Some of them dropped out of the workshops and missed out on an incredibly valuable and fulfilling experience. Arguably, these people showed a great deal of excessive self-pride and narrow mindedness: they were not able to experience the positive outcome emanating from the building of an intercultural performance, with different types of theatre styles from all around the world.

After the morning workshops, three plays would be held everyday, each from a different participant country. Unfortunately the majority of these performances were in the actors’ mother tongue and therefore, many of them did not manage to touch the audience as much as they should have. Despite the enormous language barrier, it was wonderful to at least feel the different types of theatre through their individual methods of acting and their attitudes.

Inevitably, political and religious issues emerged between some countries due to the "aggressive" themes of certain performances. The mounting tension between the Palestinians and the Israelis taking part in the festival was very evident. The Palestinian performance created a lot of controversy and many of the Israelis felt offended by it. The same thing happened with the Danish performance: it dealt with terrorism in an Islamic context. The Palestinians felt insulted by the show and left the theatre in the middle of the performance.

Apart from these uncomfortable and unfortunate incidents, every country managed to cohabitate in peace during the festival. Not only did we all live together in a general climate of harmony, but also the cultural diffusion was present everywhere in a very positive and peaceful way. Even the Israelis and the Palestinians ended up dancing together at the end of the collective performance, proving theatre's conciliatory powers.

Evening at the drama bar we had every opportunity to mix and socialise and learn more about each other’s respective cultures in order to establish a better connection within the festival.

The last performance at the centre of Vienna was unforgettable. For many of us, it was our first experience in street theatre and it was one of a kind. We even got the chance to explore a little the very soul of African music by singing an African song all together at the end of all the performance. The interaction of the audience with all the actors taking part from the different countries was very dynamic and the interest everyone showed in what was happening on stage created a sense of deep fulfilment. The audience reacted enthusiastically to the multiple levels of cultural

manifestation that each performance was made out of.

The Maltese play, Fakusi Lotu Kumba, written by Mario Azzopardi and directed by Lino Farrugia, is a satire about society and about the way democracy can be manipulated and abused hypocritically. The "rightness" (fakusi) can be messed up by "wrongness" (kumba) so as to create a parody, indeed a travesty of the tenets of genuine democratic practice. It is a play with a very typical Maltese touch to it, portraying typical Maltese attitudes and characters in a milieu which is often

obsessed by short-sighted, partisan politics. It is a play which guarantees a lot of Mediterranean energy, zest and passion.

Fakusi Lotu Kumba ended up being considered as one of the best plays entering the world festival. Critics stated that the energy and power of the play’s general attitude and of the play’s theme was exactly what they were looking for. A bunch of people came to congratulate us for the good work we had done. One of the Romanian actors congratulated us for having so much strength and so much presence on stage and also for being able to laugh at our own society. He said that such a performance would have been hard for his company to perform.

The director of the group from Singapore said that she would like to explore our acting methods in order to create something with them, since she had never seen anything like our performance.